25 Mar Musings from a Shelter-in-Place Therapist: Connecting in the Age of Coronavirus
Social distancing is the opposite of what most people dealing with substance use disorders, addiction, or mental health conditions need in their day-to-day life. Recovery of any kind generally depends on interaction, building connections, and reparative relationships with other humans—not isolation. In fact, behavioral health issues thrive in isolation and are cured in human relationships. So, how can we continue to heal our wounds during a pandemic that demands social distancing, self-quarantining, and personal isolation?
The short answer is that while we quarantine, we have to look for deeper, richer, reparative ways to connect with each other in a new world order. We need to move toward the “caremongering” that has begun to take hold in parts of the world, and away from the “scaremongering” that is found abundantly in the news and on social media.
As a therapist, my work cultivating reparative connections has required me to “fast track” newly emerging technologies and practices such as telemedicine and online therapy. They are the closest thing to having a “session” in a world where we’re mindfully “distancing” and “sheltering in place.” Over the past two weeks, I’ve been bunkered down in my home office, iBuds in my ears, having online therapy sessions. Many of my clients are struggling with feeling disconnected, anxious, and unsure about the future as chaos and uncertainty loom darkly over our world.
One of the most memorable of these sessions involved a woman of great professional power. The client, a successful founder and entrepreneur, had overcome extraordinary odds to attain professional power and material wealth in the male-dominated field of real estate financing. Prior to the “shelter in place” orders that were handed down, we’d been meeting regularly in person to treat the addictive disorder that had erupted at the height of her success. When I asked how she was doing, her answer reflected a sense of humility that I’d never before seen in the three months of sessions we’d completed. As the world’s focus had shifted as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, her own perspective had shifted as well.
Instead of seeing herself as a master who lorded over of the universe, she had started seeing herself as a grateful member of a global community. It’s a common theme I’m hearing at this time, as we all adjust to our new-found vulnerability.
“Mother nature is mad. Furious actually,” she said.
Up until this most recent session, this client had fought against even the suggestion of humility and took great pride in the power, wealth, and material possessions her professional success provided. She wore them like a bullet-proof vest that would keep her safe and powerful. But key to anyone’s recovery is humbly understanding that addiction, like any disease, is an illness with a physiological root that we’re physically powerless to alter. This pandemic is a watershed moment in our human experience for many reasons, but for many professionally powerful people, it’s introduced humility and empathy back into their mindset.
My client’s observations were a pivotal moment in her personal growth and well-being; and, they gave me hope—for her, and for all of us. Finally, she realized that the power she had compulsively hoarded for nearly her entire adult life contained a fragility that can lead to unprecedented destruction.
Power is fragile because life is fragile.
With humility we are able to connect to our shared humanity, and with each other. Her observations also captured the concerns that have consumed me on a personal level for the past several years: Long before this viral pandemic took root, we’ve been fighting pandemic of hubris and misaligned power. The malignant use of power at every level of our society is slowly destroying our world, as well as our individual and collective well-being.
Through my research and clinical practice, I’ve been shown time and time again that “power” as we’ve come to define it—wealth, privilege, position, celebrity—doesn’t prevent us from experiencing pain, illness, disease, or suffering. We expect wealth and attainment to make us impermeable, omnipotent, and untouchable. But crisis of any kind reminds us of just how fragile we truly are.
As we processed her realization, my client and I both sighed and shared a moment of solidarity. After a moment she continued, “I mean look at how humanity has devolved. The anger, the environmental degradation, the gap between the haves and the have nots. The politics of division and blame. Leaders who demand to be worshiped rather than being worthy of our respect.” She paused before tearfully asking, “What happened to our world?”
I sighed again and hesitated before responding, “We…we got lost.”
We sat silently with each other for a moment trying to hold the enormity of my observation. Staring at each other across the technology that simultaneously separated and connected us, we searched for the comfort that only a few weeks ago our physical presence would provide. Not finding it, she reached deeper into her heart and asked a question that sent shivers up my spine: “But can we find a new way forward?”
There are moments in the therapeutic process when the raw truth and intense vulnerability expressed by a patient makes it feel like time has stopped altogether. For a few heartbeats, it can feel like everything is frozen in place. This was one of these moments. Perhaps for the first time in my client’s life, she experienced the healing power of humility, fragility, and vulnerability rather than running away from it. Even though nearly three thousand miles separated us, we found ourselves emotionally connected by the sudden realization as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, our lives and the lives of every person on the global would never be the same.
In my book, Fragile Power: Why Having Everything is Never Enough, I address how power and hubris distort our individual and relational well-being. Over the last few weeks, the findings of my book have played out loudly and painfully on an international stage. What we’ve seen is that when aggression and hubris reach toxic levels, the universe steps in and recalibrates to establish a new sense of order. One of my patients based in New York City, a communication executive, described the coronavirus crisis as a “slow-moving, global 9-11.” Another patient—a high-profile entertainment lawyer—was struck by the universal implications. “This has no boundaries,” he declared with wonderful insight. “It’s affecting everyone regardless of religion, race, economic status, sexual identity…age. It will forever change the course of humanity.”
As scary as that sounds, I pray his premonition is right.
Today, our survival depends on both individual and global realignments. We must move from the shadow of hubris into the light of humility. We must honor Mother Nature rather than exploiting her; we must increase our compassion rather than our consumption; we must worship the golden rule rather than a golden calf; and, we must unite ourselves in a symphony of “we” rather than focusing on “me.”
I am optimistic we will succeed in this task. I’ve seen glorious transformations occur in my clients as they’ve healed and grown–not by acquiring power and things, but rather by embracing humility when confronting the fragility of life. My prayer is that through the carnage of this pandemic we will surrender our hubris, our addiction to toxic power and assume more humility and compassion in our relationships with each other and the natural world that we’ve been given the privilege to inhabit.
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